Duke's Coach K: Time to discover what's there

DURHAM — Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski says it’s too soon to commit to a style of play for his men’s basketball team.

There’s such a new batch of players — most of them highly rated recruits — that he’s still formulating a plan for how to use them along with senior guard Grayson Allen.

“We’re trying to learn about our guys,” Krzyzewski said Tuesday. “It takes some time to figure our guys out. … Hopefully, it’s a neat process to see what we can do.”

Krzyzewski, who’s about seven weeks removed from knee replacement surgery, said he’s moving around fine after twice-a-day rehab for about six weeks. This was his first public media appearance since the time off that resulted in the cancellation of the team’s scheduled exhibition tour to the Dominican Republic.

Krzyzewski spent a good portion of his preseason news conference on the topic of college basketball’s latest scandal, which broke last week with details of a federal investigation in a corruption case that resulted in the arrest of 10 people, including assistant coaches at major colleges.

“College basketball is an industry, it’s not just a sport,” he said. “Last week was bad. It doesn’t mean that all of college basketball is bad. It also doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the tip of some iceberg. …

“The landscape for the player keeps changing. We in college have not changed as much as the landscape has changed. “

Krzyzewski said college basketball’s model hasn’t kept up with changes in the pre-college levels and in regard to the NBA. Thus, the college game stuck in the middle in an evolving landscape.

“We try to put a circle into a square,” he said. “That’s what men’s college basketball is. It’s not a bad circle, but it can’t be done like the square.”

Meanwhile, Duke players have followed the coaching staff’s lead because they, too, say they’re trying to make sense of how it’s going to fit together on the court.

“We’re all working together and trying to figure each other out,” freshman forward Marvin Bagley III said. “If we get that down, we’ll be a very great team.”

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